RaveThe New York Times Book Review...[a] possessed true-crime investigation ... Ratliff’s journey is not just one of miles logged on the ground, but of incomparable oddness ... One of the pleasures of The Mastermind is the way in which the story effortlessly toggles between the mundane and the macabre ... haunting ... aside from the other triumphs of The Mastermind, Ratliff clearly deserves this year’s Award for Dogged Journalism for staying on his target until the very end. Without spoiling his story, the end arrives with yet another twist ... Ratliff’s efforts fail only when he tries to lash his story to sweeping themes ... Ratliff’s tale is unique, so strange and so compelling.
Melissa del Bosque
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...Melissa del Bosque’s fast-paced true-crime tale about a Mexican drug cartel and the Texas cops who chase it... Bloodlines is the story of Lawson’s big shot at dismantling a drug cartel: in this case, the Zetas, a brutal crew of Mexican commandos... What saves Bloodlines from devolving into the gratuitous gore that fills the pages of Mexico’s blood-soaked tabloid media — the so-called Red Notes, or notas rojas — is the unique, binational crime that Lawson is investigating: a colorful money-laundering operation... An investigative reporter who has covered the border for publications like Time and The Guardian for nearly two decades, del Bosque based her account on scores of personal interviews and reams of court documents, and proves herself fluent in detailing the exceedingly different, but equally rich, milieus of cartel kingpins, Texas equestrians and federal investigators ...does provide a penetrating glimpse of borderland culture set within the context of a briskly moving police procedural ...an array of unusual and interesting characters.
